▸ Column · Medieval Lordaeron — a noble betrothal and harvest-feast wedding, before Arthas took up Frostmourne.
ARTHAS MENETHIL replies.
Replied to by Arthas Menethil, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
I write to your column in some distress. My betrothed, Lord Aldric, and I have spent eight months arranging our harvest-feast wedding when his mother, the dowager Lady Diernan, sent word of an ultimatum: strike my dearest friend Lyselle from the guest roll, or she withdraws the purse of gold she pledged toward our deposit on the great hall. Her grudge is old and small — Lyselle briefly received the courtship of Aldric's younger brother three winters past, and ended it with a sealed letter, which the lady has never forgiven. But the gold is already paid; should she demand it back, we lose the hall entirely, and cannot afford the only comparable one we found. Aldric now proposes we wed quietly, just the two of us, and host our friends at some later gathering — which is Lyselle's removal exactly, merely left unnamed. Yet Lyselle is the one who brought Aldric and me together. She is written into our ceremony. To cast her out over a courtship she did not even begin feels a betrayal of the deepest kind. How do I refuse this without ruining both our coffers and Aldric's family in a single stroke?
Arthas Menethil replies
Read again the words your betrothed has chosen. "Wed quietly, host the friends later" — the same casting-out of Lyselle, only unspoken, so that none of you need say aloud what is being done. I know that grammar. At Stratholme I did not call it slaughter. I called it duty, the lesser evil, the only responsible thing, and I gave the order in a voice every bit as reasonable as Aldric's. The gold is real. Lady Diernan's threat is real — as the plague was real. I was never wrong about the threat. I was catastrophically wrong about what obeying it would make of me, and there was no road back.
So I will not pretend the purse is nothing. I will tell you to distrust the certainty that you have "no choice." That certainty is the robe duty wears when it wants you to do a thing you would otherwise refuse. The hour you betray the friend who brought you together and christen it prudence, you spend the woman who would never have done it — and she does not return when the feast hall is swept. I silenced the voice in me that objected. Yours is still speaking. It is speaking Lyselle's name. Do not silence it for a hall.
— Arthas Menethil
Captain America weighs in
Arthas spends a lot of breath on your soul, ma'am, and skips the plain fact in front of him: the dowager's a bully, and she's swinging twelve thousand in gold like a fist. Loyalty isn't for sale — not Lyselle's, not yours. So give the woman her money back. Find a smaller hall, a borrowed courtyard, a barn with the doors thrown open — I've stood up in worse and meant it more. And Aldric? Dressing the same betrayal in a quieter ceremony so nobody has to say it out loud isn't a compromise, son. It's cowardice with a bow on it. Marry the fella who'll plant his feet beside your best friend. Tell him so tonight.
— Captain America
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